In Nimrods, Kawika Guillermo chronicles the agonizing absurdities of being a newly minted professor (and overtired father) hired to teach in a Social Justice Institute while haunted by the inner ghosts of patriarchy, racial pessimism, and imperial arrogance. Charged with the "personal is political" mandate of feminist critique, Guillermo honestly and powerfully recounts his wayward path, from being raised by two preachers' kids in a chaotic mixed-race family to his uncle's death from HIV-related illness, which helped prompt ...
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In Nimrods, Kawika Guillermo chronicles the agonizing absurdities of being a newly minted professor (and overtired father) hired to teach in a Social Justice Institute while haunted by the inner ghosts of patriarchy, racial pessimism, and imperial arrogance. Charged with the "personal is political" mandate of feminist critique, Guillermo honestly and powerfully recounts his wayward path, from being raised by two preachers' kids in a chaotic mixed-race family to his uncle's death from HIV-related illness, which helped prompt his parents' divorce and his mother's move to Las Vegas, to his many attempts to flee from American gender, racial, and religious norms by immigrating to South Korea, China, Hong Kong, and Canada. Through an often crass, cringey, and raw hybrid prose-poetic style, Guillermo reflects on anger, alcoholism, and suicidal ideation-traits that do not simply vanish after one is cast into the treacherous role of fatherhood or the dreaded role of professor. Guillermo's shameless mixtures of autotheory, queer punk poetry, musical ekphrasis, haibun, academic (mis)quotations, and bad dad jokes present a bold new take on the autobiography: the fake-punk self-hurt anti-memoir.
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ââ?¬Å"Nimrods: A Fake-Punk Self-Hurt Anti-Memoirââ?¬Â? by Kawika Guillermo uses images and words to submerge readers in a turbulent confessional biography on masculine energy, the father figure, and multi-faceted male existence.
Opening with fatherhood anxiety, presumably Guillermoââ?¬â?¢s to his new son, ââ?¬Å"Nimrodsââ?¬Â? serves as a first-hand confrontation of mixed-race male identity in white patriarchy. Guillermoââ?¬â?¢s father, a large, white male is centric throughout this collection. Guillermo uses his father to point to the balancing act of owning a personal identity under the authority of a father figure. Can we create new relationships with parents we felt oppressed by, or do we emerge as our own only when the trinitarian symbolism of family is shattered?
As teens, Guillermo and his brother follow their father to East Asia, where the three begin teaching English and assimilating to their new cultural identities. Despite Guillermo�s choice to follow his father, he considers his father to have left him and his brother in the U.S. with no intention of recognizing them as his own. Key in Guillermo�s perception of his father is the endless taking that men act out. His father�s example of leave-taking creates a crisis of identity for Guillermo into adulthood. As a new father, Guillermo questions his ability and desire to parent his gender when he is unsettled about his own masculine identity.
The latter section of Guillermo�s collection is parceled in thirds. A single page contains a collage of prose, margin poetry, and historical anthology, leaving me to wonder which two of the three parts begets the third. Even in Guillermo�s expressed desire to leave his father behind, he includes a trinitarian structure that ensures his father is integral to at least one part of the union. It seems that Guillermo depends on the disdain of the father figure to fuel his world, sometimes rising from ashes and sometimes getting burned.
Throughout ââ?¬Å"Nimrods,ââ?¬Â? Guillermo challenges the White Savior trope while staying shackled to his fatherââ?¬â?¢s perspective. Eventually, however, Guillermo exacts revenge on his father with the line,
I�ll forget everything, if you forgive me for this.
This, presumably being the forced intimacy with readers through the confessional poems of ââ?¬Å"Nimrods.ââ?¬Â? On the last page, I feel like an eavesdropper, pressing my ear closer to the door for what Guillermo will reveal next.
